


This Was Probably A Mistake

by secace



Series: Reincarnation AU [3]
Category: Arthurian Mythology
Genre: M/M, and yeah i got more emotionally invested in agravaine that i ever thought possible, anyway i think i would die for him now?, okay this was discords idea dont look at me, thats just how it goes i guess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-15
Updated: 2020-03-15
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:15:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23162344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/secace/pseuds/secace
Summary: “You’re pretty good at this,” Lamorak noted, examining the neat bandage around his wrist.Agravaine frowned, and gestured for him to hold still, “three guesses why.”
Relationships: agravaine/lamorak
Series: Reincarnation AU [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1664989
Comments: 7
Kudos: 30





	This Was Probably A Mistake

**Author's Note:**

> notes at the beginning bc i have a lot to answer for here. yes this was discords idea, yes i got too invested after a late night convo and yes i wrote angst  
> this started as a joke but im. actually really invested in them now  
> this is part of my reincarnation au and it takes place after chapter 15, which is fun bc im currently only up to chapter 14, uwu it b like that. anyway, enjoy my crimes

“You’re pretty good at this,” Lamorak noted, examining the neat bandage around his wrist.

Agravaine frowned, and gestured for him to hold still, “three guesses why.”

They were in Lamorak’s apartment, sitting across from each other on his couch. It had been a weird twelve hours, most of which had not been spent on earth and some of it spent in the unpleasant company of an even more unpleasant dragon. Things had gotten decidedly worse when they had made it back to earth and had to contend with Gawain, who was about a thousand times more terrifying than a dragon or even a legion of the creatures.

The combined efforts of Mordred and Clarissant were just enough to stop him from killing Lamorak on sight, and Mordred managed to talk him into being more concerned about Agravaine than he was mad at Lamorak, who’d been banished outside with Gaheris to “walk the dog” which meant “try not to get eaten by the dog.” 

After an hour of vacillating between anxious fussing and homicidal rage directed at anyone who might be slightly responsible for the situation, including himself, Gawain was convinced to let his little brother leave, though not after making him eat something and extracting a promise to get some sleep.

“You all are certainly something.”

“I mean yeah, but,” it was easy to be annoyed at his brother, but Mordred had told him enough about what happened after he died that Agravaine at least understood why he acted that way, “he was just a bit concerned that I'd be, you know, murdered. Seeing as I was trapped on a shitty island with the random jerk we killed in a previous life.”

“Random jerk?”

“Yeah,” Agravaine asserted, trying to believe it.

“Well, I feel like an asshole then. I considered you my friend.”

Agravaine paused applying the antiseptic, because his hands had started shaking, “Oh?” he asked, buy himself time for- he wasn’t sure. 

“I guess I didn’t have many friends. Neither did you, but you had your brothers, while- I mean, Aglovale was a non-entity, and the other two I didn’t grow up with,”

A few deep breathes had steadied his hands enough to continue, and Agravaine forced himself to pay attention to the task at hand, and Lamorak’s voice, and not, well, anything else.

“It couldn’t have been Christmas, Gawain wasn’t completely wasted- must have been Pentecost, the first one both of us had at Camelot. My brother was injured or something because he wasn’t there, and some idiot had our families sitting next to each other. Recipe for disaster but I was grateful. You made some biting comment, don’t even remember what it was, other than that is was mean, because I felt bad for laughing. You didn’t expect anyone to hear, but you saw me laugh and the next comment you made directly to me, and as stupid as it is I felt sort of honoured,”

The wounds were superficial, and Agravaine had already finished bandaging them, but he pretended to check them over again, for the excuse not to let go, not to stop sitting so close. He knew his face was red and hoped to blame it on tiredness. That was something that happened when you were tired, right?

“I started looking forward to every holiday,” he grimaced, “and I started getting my brother drunk so he’d leave early. Then- you remember the tournament we had at Caerleon, in winter of, ah, fuck, I don’t even know when-”

“I do,” Agravaine interrupted, “that was five years after Badon Hill, it was to celebrate some political marriage.”

 _Oh good,_ he thought, _So I'm still capable of speech._

Lamorak nodded, “figures you would know. Anyway, I ran into you right before. You weren’t competing, so you were playing fetch boy for some brother or another. You wished me luck, because I was going against Lancelot, I guess, and you wanted to see him embarrassed,” he paused, and chuckled sort of sheepishly, “I won that tournament. First and last time I ever unhorsed Lancelot.”

“That’s why I remembered,” Agravaine found himself admitting before he could think to stop himself. That tournament had made sort of an impact on him that he’d refused to acknowledge. 

“I went to find you after, to see if you were pleased, but you had already left with your brothers. I felt rather foolish, for no good reason, and didn’t go back to court. Doing the errantry thing, for lack of anything else to do, and I found myself in Scotland, and-” he cut himself off. They both knew what had happened when Lamorak found himself in Scotland. 

Namely, he found Morgause.

“You know I wouldn’t do it again,” Agravaine burst out in the ensuing silence, hand still loosely on Lamorak’s wrist, “my brothers would but- if I could do it over...”

He trailed off. Lamorak was giving him an odd look which he understood a moment later.

“Can I kiss you?”

Agravaine did not trust himself to answer, so he tightened the grip on his wrist, leaned forward and kissed him. Lamorak made a surprised sound, but deepened the kiss, put his hands on Agravaine’s waist and pulled him onto his lap.

It was always just a second away from overwhelming, and as he pressed up against Lamorak he was torn between wanting more contact and shying away. He broke the kiss with a gasp.

“Can- I want-”

“Bed?” 

“Mhm,” Agravaine answered through lips brushing his neck. Which could have meant ’uh-huh’ which meant ’yes’ or could have been a soft moan or both. But he let himself be pulled to his feet and stumbled to the bedroom a few feet away, not letting go of Lamorak or stopping to breathe or think, because if he did that he would lose his nerve completely.

“This okay?” 

“‘sfine,” Agravaine brushed him off, and fell back onto the bed, pulling Lamorak down on top of him and kissing him again, to stop him asking more questions. But matters were progressing to the point some words were needed, and Agravaine forced himself to draw back.

“You know I- I‘m tr-”

“I know,” Lamorak said, and kissed his cheek, then down to his neck.

“And you know I’ve never-”

“I know,” he repeated, hands now at the other’s waist under his shirt.

“...okay,” Agravaine breathed, the best he could do, as his shirt was tugged over his head, and he couldn’t hear anything but his own frantic breaths and the shifting of the blankets and sheets together as Lamorak kissed him again, and it was good and it was terrifying and _what would my brothers think-_ and it was suddenly all too much.

“Stop,” he managed to choke out, and pulled away, an ungainly movement. 

Lamorak let go of him and let out an impatient breath, “what’s wrong?”

“Everything! Everything is wrong!” Agravaine felt out of control, feverish and stupid and afraid, but he was always afraid.

“You- how could we even think- I killed you, you fucked my mother!” The words came out like the twisted snarl of a wounded animal, as his fists made knots of the sheets.

“Agravaine…” he started, but trailed off. There was no way to finish that.

But Agravaine kept talking because he didn’t know how to stop now that hed started, and he wasn’t good with words like his brother was. He wasn’t as good as his brother, he knew, in general.

“I am afraid that you’ll say my mother’s name, or my brother’s, and I can’t- I don’t think I’ve ever been kissed by someone who wasn’t pretending I was someone else and, fuck, this whole thing is fucked up,” he said, the words all blurring together, looking down at his hands because there was a raw feeling in his throat like he was about to cry and that was absolutely not going to happen. 

“You shouldn’t have listened to me, I'm sorry, ignore me, keep going,” he pleaded.

Lamorak blanched, “fuck, I'm not- I'm not like- like that!”

And then Agravaine laughed, a bitter and weak little thing because now he understood.

“Oh. I get it. That makes sense.”

“What makes sense?” Lamorak demanded, and he was trying to be patient and understanding and kind, he really was, but it did not come naturally. And if there was one thing Agravaine was actually good at, it was bringing out the worst in people.

“This isn’t about me at all. It’s about that fucking bastard Pellinore- did people always tell you, growing up, how much you were like him? You look the same. I bet you were proud to hear it, too, till Tor came to court and you found out-”

“Agravaine!” 

“So you thought I’ll prove I'm better, take some wretch no one could really love and be so gentle that for a second he thought-” his voice broke, and Agravaine cut himself off, because he couldn’t cry, not here, not now, not in front of him. There was a shifting of the bed as Lamorak got up, heavy footsteps on the wood floor and the door, slamming shut. 

He flinched at the sound, then let out a strangled cry hed been holding back. An awful, sick sense of satisfaction was his only consolation, that he’d managed to make himself miserable again, a familiar and comforting sort of miserable. He thought about leaving as tears started to fall, but the thought of facing Lamorak, or even a cab driver, ran a jolt of terror through him that set off another round of sobs. 

When the door creaked gently open, it was later, though how much he didn’t know. Long enough that he had cried all he could and was left empty and tired and feeling foolish, lying crumpled in the bed of a man he was supposed to hate, wishing the world would end before morning came, or some merciful god would turn him into a dumb bird or a houseplant or something.

“Hey.”

He didn’t move. He pretended to be a marble statue, but could not picture himself so elegant or fine, so he pretended to be dead. Pictured the red blood seeping into the sheets and dripping on the floor, the way it had when- he sat up abruptly, looked at his hands and breathed out when he saw they were clean.

 _Sorry, I was pretending to be my own mother’s decapitated body and frightened myself,_ he thought of saying, and almost smiled at how stupid, how ridiculous the moment was.

The bed moved a bit under him as Lamorak sat on the edge, keeping a foot of space between them. 

“Are you…” he paused, unsure what to say, “better? I don’t know, shit. I'm sorry, I just abandoned you like a fucking asshole,”

“It’s fine, I’ll leave,” it came out a dry whisper, and somehow he wasn’t rising to leave.

“You don’t have to,” Lamorak saw his face and winced, “not for that I just- you can stay here if you don’t mind sharing…”

“I don’t,” he said, before he was aware of speaking. But being stupid and humiliated was better than being alone, or dealing with Gawain in his overprotective panic mode.

“I don’t mind,” he repeated, half under his breath. Lamorak nodded, and lay back, leaving a hands width between them, which Agravaine moved to close, because he was tired, and one could, metaphorically speaking, only get so wet, and eventually one reaches an upper limit of shame. If he was startled by this boldness, Lamorak didn’t show it, merely shifted to accommodate him. Tentatively, Lamorak put an arm around him, and he didn’t shy away, leaning into the touch and letting out a shaky breath. 

And for a few minutes, things were comfortable and quiet, but Agravaine never learned to leave well enough alone.

“Would you rather my brother, if you could have him?”

A question requiring a delicate answer. Too negative, and Agravaine would be defensive of his brother, too positive, jealous. Lamorak elected to tell the truth, failing the right thing to say.

“God, no. He’s fucking unhinged. And shorter than you.”

Agravaine laughed, a pathetic half sob, and hid his face against Lamorak’s chest. 

“I’ll ask again tomorrow,” he mumbled, half-asleep, exhaustion finally catching up with him.

“Yeah, I figured,” Lamorak said softly, “The answer won’t change.”


End file.
